How to change the theme of Office 2013

Thank you for the feedback on Office’s new look. We are actively collecting, sorting and reading through feedback on Office 2013’s design and User Experience. As the audience for Office 2013 grows, we are being mindful of patterns and pain points that emerge from user feedback. While we do not have any additional Themes planned at this time, it is an issue we are watching very closely.

Hi Deepa Raj - How unfortunate that all you do is repeatedly copy the same info from Office help without you or Microsoft responding to the real issue. I am sure all of the people with this same issue tried help before. Basically our comments are ignored and Microsoft's Community is just a one way conversation. We ask for help, you paste standard replies and then ignore the problem because Microsoft thinks the issue is resolved just because someone pasted a reply, even though the reply does not accommodate the requests of the users. In this case, we have a very hard time reading the new Microsoft menu options because we only have choices of dimmed gray.

Give them a lil copy and paste back...all but one workstation has been rolled back to 2010

It's no surprise that Microsoft is not taking this seriously.  This often happens when people have 9 to 5 jobs and can leave their work at work and don't use applications such as Outlook 2013 (2010, etc) as a "mission critical" applications.  Regardless of what we write, and I know I'm wasting my time, some people will not see this as "life critical", "financially critical" compared to many of us who unfortunately are mostly stuck with Microsoft.  We require optimized communications between customers and all others, while not WASTING time on such GARBAGE as this 2013 Outlook interface.  This was truly POORLY executed and obviously during the development, and the beta of this product, when customer feedback should be paramount to the release of a product, IT WAS NOT TAKEN SERIOUSLY.  Well done Microsoft team.  You've not only wasted my time, but thousands of peoples time.  As a large corporate, you've obviously lost perspective, or did not instill the correct perspective into your Outlook 2013 team.  You didn't focus on what the customers want, you simply pushed what YOU wanted onto your customers and that is truly BAD PRACTICE, similar to your Windows 8 strategy, and THAT is another problem for another day.

Please get tools to your software partners so they can develop new themes.

Thank you for your support.

These themes are completely unacceptable.  I have a new laptop and needed a new license to reinstall office.  I could only find 2013 to purchase.  Is there anyway I can get my 2010 license transferred to my new computer?  Also, how soon will microsoft fix this horrendous layout for office 2013?

Thank you for the feedback on Office’s new look. We are actively collecting, sorting and reading through feedback on Office 2013’s design and User Experience. As the audience for Office 2013 grows, we are being mindful of patterns and pain points that emerge from user feedback. While we do not have any additional Themes planned at this time, it is an issue we are watching very closely.

Jennie, we appreciate that Microsoft is looking at people's reactions to this. That's very good.

In the meantime, there seem to be quite a few of us who think the new design scheme for the Office suite is not good. Minimalism is great; in fact Google and their suite of products does it very well. But this is not minimalist; rather, it looks unfinished, incomplete. Moreover, the cleanness of a UI is a great idea--but the execution here is just horrible. In fact, I didn't know that I really cared about UI quite this much until I put Office 2013 on my computer. Office 2010--and all the versions before that--looked a million times better. What's more, each successive version was better, at least in my opinion. (Except for color issues in that UI--is it really that hard to add theme/color options?) With 2013, while I love the program and upgraded features, this UI is absolutely awful.

I hope you all make a change, and soon. Until then, I don't think I'll continue to use Office 2013.